Ep 164: Why Your Book Manuscript Stalls (and What Actually Helps)
If your book has been sitting in a half-finished state for longer than you'd like to admit, this episode is for you.
I'm in the middle of writing my seventh book — my first real attempt at fiction — and I'm not even going to pretend it's going smoothly. In this episode, I talk about what keeps stalling the manuscript, what finally got me moving again, and what happened when I locked herself in a hotel room for a weekend to try to power through it (the pool situation was a distraction I did not anticipate).
This episode covers the writing retreat reality check. In other words:
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why booking the coziest hotel might actually work against you
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why having even a loose plan beats having none
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what it means to "zoom out" and add anchors to your story instead of obsessing over any one scene or chapter
I also talk about working with my critique partners (Neely Tubati Alexander and Ann Garvin), why their blunt feedback on a certain Ferris wheel scene was exactly what I needed, and how being too close to your own work is just an unavoidable part of the process.
Whether you're writing memoir, nonfiction, or fiction, and whether you've been at it for three months or three years, stalling is not failure. It's writing. And this episode is a reminder that literally every author goes through it.
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